I need critique on my Webcomic and some honest advice

[barakothepirate]

Read The Eye of Vyrius | Tapas Web Community

My webcomic has a massive drop off past the first chapter. like 1.2k views for chapter 1, to like only 300 views, for chapter 2, then 200 to chapter 3. It means that the first chapter stinks for some reason. I got my suspicions, but I'd like some of you to confirm it. It's too violent is it? The child abuse themes for the first two chapters are too heavy for most ordinary people, so they leave... Posted my comic on reddit and it barely gotten any upvotes, and somebody said they hated it without explaining why...

What do I do about this? I want to tackle these themes, cause these things happened to me to some degree and I have knowledge of the subject and it'll be hard to do the rest of the planned story, but I also don't want people to leave. I'm thinking of rewriting it to be less violent and offputting to most people, like censor it to some degree. How do I do that though? And what exactly does the comic do that is so offensive? Is it the punching of Reizt? I'm genuinely at a loss, and kind of sad, cause the rest of the comic seems to have received about average likes... Don't worry about hurting my feelings, please be honest...

[thepenmonster]

NOTE- This is not a critique. A critique is a teaching tool and as such requires that I teach you how to improve. This is opinion and so you can feel free to ignore it.

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1. All comics drop off after the first installment. From Spider-Man down to the most humble of Canvas BL strips.

2. The art is inconsistent. Color one panel, rough sketches the next. If you're having trouble meeting the self-imposed deadlines, change the deadlines.

3. The art is amateurish. This will improve with study and practice.

4. The story isn't clear. What is the goal of the story? Showing the damage of abuse? A kid retreating into fantasy? Found family? Slice of life about a shitty life? Cut away anything that doesn't serve that goal.

5. Yes, the child abuse is off putting. You will have a hard time selling this sort of subject matter to an audience even if you were a master of the art. If it's the motivating factor of the story then you will need to make it more palatable. If it's there because you need to work though your own trauma, tackle it head on and make a autobiographical comic instead.

[barakothepirate]

1. It doesn’t usually drop off that severely, like a few hundred at most though..
2. Yeah, I agree. When I first created it, it was just for shits and giggles, I didn’t really work that hard on drawing it…
3. Yeah. I’ve heard the best practice is simply doing the webcomic. Im working on it, and I think with late chapters I’ve improved a little..
4. It’s a prologue of sorts, I’m still setting up all the characters and their personalities. I guess showing the effects of abuse, how it affects someone’s personality. Several planned story lines later on deal with Reizt behaving strangely because of it.
5. It is kind of a autobiography of sorts, Reizt is a self insert… so yeah I am kind of using it to deal with past issues… I don’t wanna get anyone in trouble though, so I refuse to use real names or even base them on real people I’ve known, making a full on auto-biography would get me into trouble.

Thanks for your opinion pen monster, you’ve been a great help!

[BoomerZ]

It doesn’t usually drop off that severely, like a few hundred at most though..

Yes the dropoff is usually about 70%. This is because lots of people will try out your first episode, then move on. On Tapas my first episode has 2300 views, second episode has 600.

[barakothepirate]

Huh? Really? Okay, maybe I’m whining for nothing…. Come to think of it, maybe I shouldn’t change the first chapter, I feel like reddit has just gotten to me again, thinking about mainstream appeal and numbers is kinda ruining me… still would like to hear people’s opinions about my webcomic though.

[kyupol]

Read the first few episodes will read later when I have more time.

1) child abuse isn't so bad. I've depicted far worse child abuse and domestic violence in my previous comics. As long as you steer clear of nudity and extreme violence (in the visual depiction sense) it seems to be fine.

2) the drop off part? Happens to everyone. You see, people often read the first few episodes and then they make up their mind if they like it or not. Or totally forget due to time constraints.

3) art wise? Not being mean here but definitely needs work. An obvious thing I noticed is size consistency between characters. How tall exactly are they compared to one another?

4) not "offensive" as far as I'm concerned. But again, purely my opinion and I work with pretty dark themes in my comics and I'm also very pro free speech (nearly got arrested for it on a few occasions during my youth) so it probably takes far more to offend me than the average person.

[barakothepirate]

Yeah I really need to use lineups and stick with them… i think I do a little better with this in later chapters, but those early chapters the sizes are all over the place. Again, I was really half assing those early chapters, and only recently have become to colour them and redo them a little, they used to be even worse with inconsistency and messiness.

Concerning it being offensive, yeah that’s good to hear it’s not. I didn’t wanna purposely offend or shock people with my comic, it was simply to set up later events as well as set up the bad guys being bad guys in the comic.

Thanks for taking the time to read it! Really means a lot!